Adwords click fraud, Google settles PPC legal case
By: Jonathan Briggs
March 11, 2006
Pay-per-click advertising has become one of the most important aspects of ecommerce on the web. But advertisers worry that they are paying more than they should because of unscrupulous clicking on their ads known as 'click fraud'.
Now, Yahoo! News reports Google to Pay 90M in 'Click Fraud' Case.
If you run an ecommerce store you are faced with the ongoing job of getting customers to your site. You used to do this offline with advertising and PR and then with online banners. More recently you spent time optimising your site so that it would appear higher up the search results. Today you are likely to run PPC ads; text ads that run alongside search results and when clicked cost the advertiser a few pence or a few pounds (depending on the competitiveness of the keywords).
the OTHER media runs PPC campaigns for a number of our clients as well as for ourselves and they have proved to be extremely effective. They compliment search engine optimisation and other forms of marketing well.
But 'click fraud' is definitely a worry when margins are tight and keywords expensive. How do we know that malicious competitors are not clicking on the ads just to cost us money?
The answer is that we don't and the reported legal case suggests that Google is admitting that there is a genuine level of 'click fraud' in the system. But as Yahoo! News points out, the level of the settlement suggests that the problem may be smaller than feared.
What should a PPC advertiser do?
The first imperative is to design the ad campaign well to maximise return on investment even if there are a few rogue clicks. This means understanding how to select keywords, how to bid on keywords and how to position the ads so that you are not paying more than your need.
Carefully designed ads have proved so effective that we can afford a small loss through 'click fraud'. We do need Google adwords and the other PPC networks to step up their vigilance and find new ways to detect rogue clicks but PPC is definitely here to stay.